Storage Drives

2.5” drives are significantly smaller than standard 3.5” ones, making them great candidates for upgrading the storage of your laptop or games console, especially as they're available in capacities up to 3TB. Remember to check the height of the drives, as most portable or console systems only have bays which support 9.5mm drives or less. Also pay attention to the spin speed in rpm; while all drive here use the latest SATA III 6Gbps interface, faster spinning drives will read and write data faster.

SATA III 6Gb/s SSDs may no longer be the fastest around thanks to emerging PCIe SSDs, but they're the most cost-effective and are still easily fast enough for most users. You'll need a spare SATA 6Gb/s port to get the most from them, and a 2.5” capable drive bay – an adaptor may need to be bought, but most cases have at least one. These drives are the highest capacity ones available, suitable for holding an operating system, as well as numerous programs and a healthy collection of media and games.

These 3.5” hard drives utilise the newer SATA III 6Gb/s interface, ensuring as high speeds as possible with their mechanical technology, especially when using them in RAID. They're the most popular drives for today's desktop PCs, thanks to high spindle speeds, lots of cache and huge capacities. You can now get up to 10TB in a single drive, meaning even small form factor machines can store masses of media and games.

Hybrid hard drives combine a traditional, high capacity mechanical HDD section with a smaller, flash-based SSD section that acts as a cache, giving your system a boost in responsiveness. They won't be as fast as a pure SSD, but they're a great compromise between speed and capacity.

This the Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF) or M.2 as its now called
M.2 replaced the older mSATA standard, The M.2 SSD Connects to your device via a M.2 Socket via either PCI Express using AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) which was the standard for older legacy operating systems, And the newer PCI Express using NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) controller variant designed to fully utilize the capability of high-speed PCI Express storage devices to perform many I/O (in/out) operations in parallel.
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While the M.2 connector can be used for PCIe SSDs, the ones here are SATA 6Gb/s only, so the benefits over standard 2.5” SATA drives are to do with space-saving, not speed. They're perfect for small form factor systems and laptops, but make sure your M.2 slot works with SATA devices, and that it supports the SSD's size, both in length (2280 means 80mm long) and thickness.